The Long Tail - Keywords and Search

The long tail is a phrase coined by Chris Anderson and now the subject of a best selling book which essentially describes how the economy is moving from mass marketing to niche marketing.

 If you take a book store, record store and similar and examine the sales.

Then the so called top 10 books account for approximately 50% of sales, whereas the remainder of the sales come from the 1000's of other not so well know titles.

These other sales are what is known as the long tail.

The original series of articles appeared in Wired magazine and are well worth a read and the book is available on Amazon.

Long Tail and Keywords

From a website perspective how does the long tail apply to your web pages? Well on my website the top 10 keywords bring 48% of the traffic 52 % of the traffic find my site while searching using over 2500 other unique keywords.

Although this is interesting how do you make use of it? As surely it isn't possible to optimise a page/site for so many different keywords. The answer is you don't actually optimise for the long tail keywords but you try to include them on the pages and if possible within anchor text.

To get a better idea you may want to take a look at this video I found on Youtube which covers this quite well.

Web www.build-your-website.co.uk

Related Articles and Resources:

• The Long tail articles in Wired magazine
• Wikipedia Long tail description.
• Long tail 101 by Chris Anderson
• Search's Long Tail- Danny Sullivan